The government's communications department should have read up on their Aesop's fables before turning to children's nursery rhymes for inspiration. When the wolf really did arrive to worry the village's flock, the people ignored his, this time genuinely, for the first-time heartfelt pleas. The shepherd boy's false alarms had wearied them and even though the danger was now real, they ignored it and the wolf ate both him and the sheep.

However, all is not as simple as it may first seem. First, the way the ASA regulates adverts depends on public complaints. Often the most crass examples of corporate greenwash, such as Finnair's misleading and unsubstantiated 'Be Eco-smart' campaign escape immediate censure because only one or two people actually raise an objection to them. It isn't particularly surprising therefore that in the light of so-called climategate, and the vocal rise of militant, largely ideological scepticism, the government's "nursery rhyme" public education campaign on climate change should attract a huge number of complaints. These probably come from the highly effectively mobilized camp of formal and informal lobbyists, their tactic of FUD – Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt – working unarguably and disturbingly well. It is far easier to hurl a massive rock into the pool of climate science and capitalize on the resulting ripples, than it is to build and maintain a calm, coherent scientific consensus. And boy, their tactical trebuchets are chucking a lot of rocks.

This disruption strategy is nothing new and was similarly applied against Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. As is the case now, the judgment created a media storm, which occludes the underlying message of both Gore's film and this current campaign, which crucially neither ruling has contested; climate change is happening, and it's probably a pretty good idea for us all to do something about it rather pronto.

Second, in a weirdly perverse way the "nursery rhyme" campaign inadvertently replicates the tactics used by the climate sceptic lobbyists themselves. It creates fear about the impacts of climate change, and it rather over-forcefully hypes the threat of uncertain impacts – thereby playing into the hands of "alarmist/warmist" accusing critics. Worse still it implicitly creates doubt about the yawning gulf between government rhetoric and the tangible, practical actions people are currently willing to undertake. Quite rightly, a somewhat cynical and wary public simply don't buy this.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, the adverts were just bad communication and they have probably helped push climate change engagement with the UK public backwards several years. They are easily mocked, simply satirized and I find it hard to believe they made it through the scrutiny of focus groups that undoubtedly precede the wider launch of these campaigns. It comes across as something that might have been conceived on-the-hoof in an episode of The Thick Of It, and I don't mean that as a compliment. The real danger is that it's a now publicly discredited cry of "wolf" that can only serve to compound the climate change communications challenge. It's the fizzle not the sizzle, or as Malcolm Tucker might have put it; "As a communications campaign its about as much use as a marzipan dildo."